Part 2

Just below the great bend in the Mukuntuweap River looms an isolated rock temple of prodigious bulk and imperial majesty, a truncated pyramid or mayhap a flattened dome, its lower half red, its upper half tinting from rosy buff to white, a forest of tall pines, acres in extent, upon its untrodden summit. This colossal butte, “one of the world’s great rocks,” is seen most effectively from the Temple of Sinawava, through the inverted maroon arch between the Great Organ and Angels Landing. It appears completely detached from the east wall, aloof and unscalable. While it has not been officially measured, its crest is probably more than 3,000 feet above the river.

To the north is Cable Mountain, whence a rope of steel wire conveys lumber to the valley from the forested plateau. Between it and the next peak is Raining Cave and the site of a cliff dwelling.

The Temple of Sinawava

Beyond the bend the precipices of jasper red confine a flower-dotted meadow shaded by trees, where sphinx-like figures, colossi, and shattered pylons of warm and sombre reds suggest the Egyptian ruins at Karnak and Thebes. Several obelisks rise isolated from the gardens of the shrine. This is the beautiful Temple of Sinawava, the last of the courts as one ascends the Canyon. It was here that President Harding paid his tribute to Zion in 1923.

The Narrows

Half a mile beyond, the dragon’s-blood precipices become more perpendicular and close in toward each other until the gorge seems blocked, but a turn opens new vistas. Now, it is no more than seventy-five feet from cliff to cliff and the stream stretches from wall to wall. But there is one last glorious picture for those who must turn back. A short distance farther up the gorge soars a slender, ethereal cone of pink and white, a peak of such appealing symmetry and delicate tints, so lofty and aspiring, that it evokes a cry of admiration. It is the Mountain of Mystery.

The Wet Trail

The Canyon continues some eight miles farther, but its exploration is only for the adventurous few. There is no trail but the winding river which reaches from wall to wall; sudden rainstorms send between the scarred and splintered cliffs a resistless torrent of water. With a competent guide those in search of unusual thrills may ride horseback several miles into the deep sunless cleft where great pendants of rock overhang and shut out the sky; where the churning stream in flood has left intricate cameos and arabesques upon the sandstone; where little waterfalls leap from green ledges; where one may almost touch both sombre walls with outstretched hands; where the stars may be seen by day. Many a time the canyon seems to end with prison-like finality and the sky seems lost forever. It is a travel adventure that may not be had elsewhere and one never forgotten.

Zion from the Rims

Seen from above, the aspect of Zion is wholly different. Instead of a relatively straight and orderly canyon dominantly red in color, it becomes a fantastic maze of white and variegated buttes and cones. Mr. Hal G. Evarts thus described in _The Saturday Evening Post_ his impressions from the West Rim:

“It seemed that we gazed out across some vast oriental city that stretched away for a dozen miles. Scores of gaudy mosques and tinted towers, striped citadels topped by flat-roof gardens rose in countless tiers from this congested, painted metropolis.... And the coloring! Imagine a tremendous city of spires and turrets ..., its buildings catching every dazzling reflection of the sunset.... There were soft apricot and salmon tints, vague pinks and creams; lemon blending into deepest orange, ... with here and there a haunting suggestion of pale mauve. Brilliant red spires stood beside domes of ivory white. In many of these fairy structures the stratifications pitched so abruptly as to lend a spiralling, barber-pole effect....”

And Zion Canyon is but a part of Zion National Park.

Cedar City to Cedar Breaks

Cedar Breaks is twenty-three miles by highway east of Cedar City and four-fifths of a mile nearer the sky. Immediately east of the town the road enters the rugged gorge of Coal Creek, its slopes covered with fine forests of conifers and aspens. The walls assume impressive castellated forms that are especially striking at the mouth of Ashdown Gorge, eight miles distant. Ashdown Gorge is an extremely narrow, tortuous and precipitous rift in the plateau, down which rushes a sparkling stream from the vast furrows of Cedar Breaks. About one mile from the mouth and high up the precipice is a natural bridge with an arch of about sixty feet and a span of about seventy feet.

Following Coal Creek, ever upward, the road presently occupies a shelf upon the shoulder of the Markagunt Plateau whence are revealed glorious and almost illimitable panoramas. The whole sweep of the Terraced Plateau country to the south is visible. Some twenty-five miles directly south, slashed into the green of the Kolob Plateau, are the mazy, white-topped temples and towers of Zion, the grand West Temple dominating the scene. The sinuous profiles of the Pink, White and Vermilion Cliffs are discernible; the hazy arch of the Kaibab; and the misty dome of Navajo Mountain, beyond the Colorado. Several volcanic peaks are in the foreground.

This immense range of visibility is one of the strong attractions of the Terraced Plateau country; one sees again and again, in new and startling aspects, the salient features of hundreds of square miles of territory and its spectacular geological structure.

At Midway the road turns northward for three miles through stately pines, firs and spruces and comes without warning to the abyss named Cedar Breaks.

Cedar Breaks

Cedar Breaks is a series of vast amphitheatres eroded to a depth of 2,000 feet into the Pink Cliff formation at the summit of the Markagunt Plateau and covering an area of approximately sixty square miles in the Sevier National Forest. Its forested rim, 10,300 feet in elevation, has been etched back into Blowhard Mountain and adjacent eminences; and a short distance to the north the blunted volcanic crest of Brian Head rises 900 feet higher, affording a panorama of practically all of southern Utah, Nevada and northern Arizona.

Within its limitless labyrinths countless millions of grotesque and magnificent architectural forms, anointed with all the colors of the spectrum, flash into the eyes of the beholder. The erosional structures are blends of Egyptian and massive medieval Gothic walls, modified in a thousand surprising and original details, and rising generally from far-flung, wedge-shaped base courses of white and orange. The colors change marvelously in response to the sun; pink is dominant, though, at times, orange tones seem to prevail. In broad aspect the color scheme is pink, red, orange, yellow, white, lavender and purple, with intermediate tints and hues that would form a dictionary of pigments; and on the countless scalloped slopes appears the green of spruces, firs and pines. An artist has counted more than sixty tints in Cedar Breaks.

There are six or seven great amphitheatres, semicircular or three-quarter circles in shape, with sharp ridges radiating from rim to center; the few trails into the abysmal serrate basins are faint and obscure, yet the descent with a guide offers unsuspected marvels; then only does one comprehend the immensity and the variety of Cedar Breaks.

Along the rims are several easily reached viewpoints, among them Point Supreme and Point Perfection. Conspicuous in the welter of forms below are innumerable red, castellated bastions in parallel rows; long, writhing dragon-like forms of pure white; and huge sprawling dinosaurs covered with blood. For all its beauty, the place might appropriately have been the habitat of prehistoric monsters. The panoramas westward across the deserts of the Great Basin are notably fine.

In vastness, in variety of color, in wild grandeur, Cedar Breaks is the greatest of Utah’s painted amphitheatres.

Cedar Breaks to Bryce Canyon

It is seventy miles from Cedar Breaks to Bryce Canyon. Crossing the broad summit of the Markagunt Plateau the highway traverses fine coniferous forests that frequently open into charming “parks,” and passes great areas covered with lava from Hancock Peak and the adjacent extinct volcanoes. Navajo Lake, a beautiful mountain tarn encircled by pines and a noted fishing water, is about eight miles beyond Midway.

Soon pretty Duck Creek, rising in full power from a fine spring and filled with trout, parallels the highway for several miles, then disappears under the volcanic rock. At the crossing of Strawberry Gulch a little used trail extends southward to Strawberry Point, a famous observation place on the Pink Cliffs. The main highway is alternately surfaced with white, pink and red rock, a painted road in a land of color.

At Cedar Breaks Junction, the route turns north, following the head waters of the Sevier River, one of the most important streams of the Great Basin; to the eastward, in the vicinity of Hatch, vistas of the Pink Cliffs appear. Then the road crosses the Sevier and enters Red Canyon.

The rich red turrets and towers at this canyon gateway are harmonious introductions to the greater glories of Bryce. Once within its narrow defile, the superb portal broadens into a little pine-dotted valley and its walls display hundreds of spires, windowed walls, bridges, columns and statue-like shapes of pink and ruby. The road, often running through arches in the red cliffs, is as smooth as a boulevard. Next, the route leads out upon the level, treeless surface of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, and comes with startling unexpectedness to one of the splendid amphitheatres of the Pahreah Basin.

Bryce Canyon National Monument

Probably Bryce Canyon is the most astonishing blend of exquisite beauty and grotesque grandeur that the forces of erosion have ever produced. In one aspect it is a gorgeous lacework design of frost and fire, the playground of sylphs and fairies; in another it is a smoldering inferno habited by goblins and demons; again, it seems as if some cataclysmic force had shuffled together a dozen oriental cities into one spectacular municipality. The joyous prevailing colors of this immense bowl of luminous, flickering filigree heaped with jewels, are pink, red, orange, purple, yellow and white; to these may be added as many other tints and tones as one has patience to distinguish. Though Bryce is immense, yet it is intimate, presenting to the eye a scintillating coral intaglio of bizarre but definite plan, overspread with a halo of lavender mist.

It is not a canyon, but an amphitheatre of horseshoe shape, graven 1,000 feet deep into the sandstones on the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, at the headwaters of the Pahreah River; it is approximately two miles wide and three miles long and its rim is 8,000 feet in elevation. The area of Bryce Canyon National Monument, which was created in 1923 and is administered by the _U. S. Department of Agriculture_, is 7,440 acres.

In the maze of architecture uprising from Bryce’s sunken gardens, where pine, spruce and manzanita spread their greens, there are the styles of China and Egypt, of the Toltecs, Incas, Greeks and Goths; but stronger, perhaps, is the resemblance to those decaying Dravidian temples, bursting with decoration, in the jungles of Burmah and Java: pagodas, mosques, minarets, kiosks, fairy castles, cathedrals, theatres, flying buttresses and stairways, suspension bridges, niched and fenestrated walls, peristyles, colonnades, lotus columns, leaning towers, slim spires, massive pylons, pyramids, obelisks, pilasters capped by tilted disks, cones supporting cones, organs, shrines and altars. All of the architects of antiquity might have drawn their inspiration from the silent cities of Bryce.

And these dream-tissue cities in the realm of muted mystery have weird inhabitants statued in variegated stone: giants and gnomes, popes and queens, kneeling penitents, companies of marching soldiers, gargoyles, fauns, satyrs, nymphs, witches, horses, dogs, lizards, frogs and turtles--figures that seem to move, sway and posture in the flashing play of light and shadow. The least vivid imagination needs a checkrein.

In the east, on a headland of the Table Cliffs, an outlier of the vast Aquarius Plateau, the mesa rises by ramps and colonnades of pink and buff to a level esplanade where stand a dozen glorified Acropolises,--façades, friezes, pillars and porticoes, in ruins of rosy marble. There, as everywhere, the marionettes of the sun continually perform their evanescent dances. And this is but a vista chosen at random from a hundred glorious panoramas.

Farther in the east, the amphitheatre opens out to make way for the headstreams of the Pahreah River; the green fields surrounding the village of Tropic may be seen and the ramparts of the Kaiparowitz Plateau.

Bryce should be seen from the west rim in the morning, from the east rim in the afternoon. The exquisite pageant of shimmering tints begins when dawn thrusts the first spears of light into the abysses. The best effects are obtained when the formations are between the beholder and the sun; it is then that the mysterious, lambent flames flicker in the distant temples and play upon altars and columns, warming them into living, glowing color. Trails extend in both directions along the rim of the Canyon from Bryce Lodge and the vistas change with almost every step taken.

Sunset upon Bryce Canyon is another breath-taking manifestation of Nature’s magic, followed by a solemn twilight of the innumerable gods that dwell there in pomp and splendor. The visitor should see both dawn and dusk transform the great amphitheatre, and should see it sleeping in the noonday light.

Every visitor should take the trail into the depths of Bryce Canyon, either on foot or horseback. Lacy designs and dainty figures, seen from the rim, assume huge proportions when one is amongst them; there are sunless grottoes and shadowed crypts, wafer walls pierced by many windows, artists’ studios filled with half-finished models and figurines, innumerable fantastic forms in bronze, jasper, ruby amethyst, topaz and alabaster. Each turn in every innumerable aisle, alley and corridor on Bryce’s intricate floor has its charming revelations of unimagined contour and color.

Zion Canyon to Kaibab Forest and North Rim of Grand Canyon

The highway crosses the _Rio Virgen_ at Rockville and climbs the plateau, whence splendid views may be had of the Temples of Zion. Near the Arizona boundary appear the magnificent Vermilion Cliffs which stretch across Southern Utah for great distances; they present the arresting architectural effects of vast castles and cathedrals colored rich red which becomes vivid vermilion in the afternoon sun.

After crossing Short Creek into Arizona the immense blue arch of the Kaibab Plateau becomes more prominent and Mt. Trumbull, an extinct volcano overlooking Grand Canyon, looms in the purple distance. Upon this stretch of fascinating desert range many wild horses, direct descendants, perhaps, of those brought to America by the Spaniards. On Cedar Ridge is a petrified forest.

The road follows the Vermilion Cliffs eastward through the Kaibab Indian Reservation to Pipe Spring, a celebrated oasis on the plains, created a National Monument in 1923. The two historic stone buildings standing there were erected more than fifty years ago in fortress style for protection from the Indians; from beneath one house flows the finest and purest spring in all this frontier domain, daily discharging 100,000 gallons of cool water.

At Pipe Spring, the Vermilion Cliffs recede northward and give place to the Shinarump Cliffs, banded with gorgeous colors--red, brown, lavender, chocolate and white. A conspicuous butte seen approaching Fredonia is The Battleship. Fredonia is a pretty little Mormon community of 300 inhabitants and the only town in Arizona north of the Grand Canyon.

Between Fredonia and the Kaibab is one of the most picturesque and exquisitely colored stretches of upland in America. Whites, blacks, browns, yellows, pinks, purples, reds and all their pale intermediate tints are splashed over these prismatic plains, where cactus, yucca, piñon, sage and cedar somehow find sustenance.

Almost imperceptibly, the automobile has climbed the gentle slopes of the Kaibab. Looking backward to the north one of the grandest spectacles of the Plateau Country is unfolded. Nearly 10,000 feet of terraced rock layers are exposed edgewise across a frontage of some sixty miles. A glorious panorama, these painted precipices! First the rainbow Shinarump, then the Vermilion, White and Pink cliffs, tier upon tier and hundreds of miles in convoluted length, all shining and shifting in the sun.

Kaibab National Forest

Beautiful as are the plains, the transition to the limitless park-like forests of the Kaibab is a welcome delight. Kaibab is a Piute Indian word meaning “Mountain-lying-down,” a description that fits it well. It is actually a vast plateau, some fifty miles long and thirty-five miles wide, and containing 500 square miles of yellow pine, fir and spruce diversified by charming aspen copses, the largest and most beautiful virgin forest in the United States. In elevation it rises from 7,500 to 9,300 feet above sea level.

Kaibab Forest occupies the top of a lofty plateau isolated on the south and east by the Grand Canyon, on the north and west by the mysterious plains above which it rises 5,000 feet. On all sides are unexplored plateaus and canyons where untouched cliff dwellings stand. Beneath its stately trees the grassy forest floor is free from underbrush and fallen timber, as clean as if raked daily by ten thousand foresters; and, although they are not widely distributed, there are many lovely wild flowers and ferns. Scattered throughout its great extent are spacious “parks,” green-swarded, treeless open spaces bordered by white-boled, quivering aspens, the advancing light cavalry of an innumerable army of deploying pines. The witchery of these sylvan plaisances is wholly irresistible; they seem designed for parades and pageants, for the light-hearted moods of man and beast.

And so, indeed, they are employed. Afternoon and morning they are the gathering places of many of the 30,000 black-tail mule deer that range unfrightened through the forest. They do not require patient stalking to be seen; crossing the forest one may usually count several hundred haughty bucks, solicitous does, and adorable prancing fawns of exquisite grace. Their only enemies are the cougars, much reduced in number by “Uncle” Jimmy Owens, the government hunter who was Roosevelt’s guide, and other official huntsmen. Second in interest of the Kaibab’s creatures is the white-tailed squirrel (_Sciurus Kaibabensis_) which may ordinarily be seen flickering through the forest near Jacobs Lake Ranger Station. This is the most beautiful squirrel in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the rarest, for it lives nowhere else. It is about the size of a large gray squirrel, though shorter and stockier, is dark bluish gray marked with brown, has long tufted ears and a broad feathery tail that is almost pure white. Cougars and mountain sheep are rarely seen by the ordinary traveler. Captain Dutton wrote of a visit to the Kaibab in 1880: “It is difficult to say precisely wherein the charm of the sylvan scenery of the Kaibab consists. We, who through successive summers have wandered through its forests and parks, have come to regard it as the most enchanting region it has been our privilege to visit.

“There is a constant succession of parks and glades--dreamy avenues of grass and flowers winding between sylvan walls, or spreading out in broad open meadows.... The balmy air, the dark and sombre spruces, the pale-green aspens, the golden shafts of sunshine shot through their foliage, the velvet sward--surely this is the home of the woodland nymphs.”

The North Rim of the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is the supreme epic of erosion; there water has perpetuated its sublimest masterpiece in stone. “The Grand Canyon fills me with awe,” wrote Roosevelt. “It is beyond comparison--beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world.” “Wildness so Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of the earth’s beauty and size,” said John Muir. “By far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles,” is the opinion of world travelers who have studied its grandeur.

The Grand Canyon may be described as a vast and intricate range of sunken mountains cut through a hundred miles of high plateau, “a mountain chain reversed.” Usually it is pictured as a colossal chasm, 220 miles in length, a mile deep and some twelve miles wide; but it is more precisely a measureless labyrinth of canyons with an infinite array of magnificent architectural forms upthrust from their depths. Deep down in the uttermost gorge of granite, the Colorado, “the rushingest, roaringest” river in the land, grinds ceaselessly at the rocks. Numberless rich and vivid tones of gray, green, blue, red and mauve tint its mighty walls and temples, and, independent of these, the sunlight pours daily into the chasm a shifting color parade of exquisite blues and purples, glowing reds and golds.

Of the Kaibab division of the Grand Canyon, Captain Dutton states: “It is the sublimest portion of the chasm, being nearly a thousand feet deeper than any other, far more diversified and complex and is adorned with a multitude of magnificent features, either wanting or much less strongly represented elsewhere.” According to the _U. S. Geological Survey_, the Kaibab division is from seven to fourteen miles wide and from 5,300 to 6,000 feet deep. The elevation of the North Rim is from 8,000 to 9,000 feet and it is eroded extensively into tremendous lateral gorges and amphitheatres. The North Rim has the incomparable Kaibab Forest, uncounted unexplored cliff dwellings, and a summer climate distinguished by unfailingly cool nights. Along its winding edge are a number of noted capes and headlands that reveal some of the grandest aspects of the Canyon.

Bright Angel Point stretches out between the Transept and Bright Angel Canyon; from its dizzy tip may be seen many of the finest temples: Deva, Brahma, Zoroaster, Wotan’s Throne, Manu, Buddha, Isis, Angels Gate and Cheops Pyramid. Near by is a picturesque spring with a perfectly preserved cliff dwelling adjacent. The Kaibab Trail descends from the Point to the Suspension Bridge across the Colorado River, where it joins the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim.